1857. favored Syracuse, but am more and more convinced that Cleve- CH. XVII. land is better. If, however, you still doubt, and think it worth while to call a meeting of our committee, please inform me without delay, and I will appoint one. We must have one in a week or so at any rate, to prepare the list of names for publication. The financial panic which has made the year 1857 memorable, and which began in September with the failure of an Ohio banking institution, frustrated the scheme for holding the Convention. W. L. Garrison to Samuel J. May. BOSTON, October 18, 1857. MS. In view of the earthquake shock which all the business operations of the country have received, and the absorption of all minds in the deep pecuniary embarrassments of the times,and, therefore, the palpable inexpediency of attempting to hold a Convention of the Free States (as hitherto contemplated) at Cleveland, on the 28th and 29th inst.,- Mr. Higginson, Mr. Phillips, and myself, after grave and serious consideration, have assumed the responsibility of postponing our projected Northern Lib. 27:170. Convention until a more auspicious period at the same time, letting an informal convention be held at Cleveland at the time specified, of such as can make it convenient to be present, so as not to create too great a local disappointment. All our Agents will be there, and no doubt they will make it a stirring meeting. But, in the present paralyzed state of things, it would be absurd to try to secure anything like a representation from the several States, and so we shall go for postponing the Northern Convention. I am the more reconciled to this because Phillips could not have gone to it, if it had been held this month. Theodore Parker, Phillips, Higginson, etc., will send letters to the meeting at Cleveland, expressive of their views on the Disunion question, which will help to mitigate the disappointment that will be felt by our Ohio friends at their non-attendance. I shall also send a letter; and I hope you will do the same, in case you shall conclude not to go to Cleveland, after what I have written. The panic greatly crippled the regular operations of the anti-slavery societies, and forced a reduction of Lib. 27: [178]. CH. XVII. 1857. Charlotte E. Newell; Lib. 27: 163. 1854. expenditures in all their departments. Mr. Garrison's support was naturally rendered more precarious than ever, while some special burdens were laid upon him. In the just-quoted letter to Mr. May, he wrote: "After a wasting sickness of nine months' duration (more than six of which were passed under my roof), my aunt Charlotte saw 'the last of earth' on the 2d inst. I rejoice that I was able to give her every attention, and to do all in my power to relieve and save her; but her illness has thrown upon me a heavy pecuniary load,- some hundreds of dollars additional." 66 or a crust of On the very eve Mrs. Newell was the youngest and much loved sister of Fanny Lloyd. On her losing her employment in 1854, MS. Apr. 7, Mr. Garrison wrote to his widowed relative, offering her a home for the remainder of her days. "While I have a place to shelter my own head," he said, bread to eat, you shall share it with me." of her dissolution, a curious discovery was made, after more than thirty years, of a few hundred dollars belonging to Mr. Garrison's mother in a Baltimore savings-bank. This sum, by the friendly intervention of John Needles, was paid over to the rightful heir, and served to discharge a part of the expense of Mrs. Newell's medical attendance and burial. 'It looks almost like a providential occurrence," wrote Mr. Garrison to Mr. Needles. "If my mother can take cognizance of what I am doing in this matter, her heart will thrill with delight to perceive to what a use her bequest is put." MS. Sept. 22, 1857. MSS. W. L. G., June 18, 20, แ But the charity of Mr. Garrison and his wife neither began nor ended at home. Straitened themselves for Lib. 27:203; means in this gloomy time, their active sympathy was MS. Nov. 8, extended to various forms of poverty and distress - from 1857, W.L.G. to a reduced Irish family to refugees from Napoleon's prisonT. Parker. house at Cayenne. 28:3 N% CHAPTER XVIII. THE IRREPRESSIBLE CONFLICT. 1858. 1858. Lib. 28: 70, 78, 83. N. P. Banks. ing. E. G. LorLib. 28:38: ante, p. 416. Mar. 2, 1858; Lib. 28:38. attempt was made in 1858 to renew the Disunion CH. XVIII. Convention of the previous year. The financial prostration continued, and, furnishing a pretext to the clergy to blow up a spurious revival of religion, became a greater obstacle than ever. The Massachusetts abolitionists, however, relying upon the new Executive of the State, again besieged the Legislature for the removal of Judge Loring from an office which he doggedly clung to, in open defiance of the Personal Liberty Law of May 21, 1855an unconstitutional statute, as he insisted. Mr. Garrison went in March before the Joint Special Committee having the petitions under consideration, with a paper drawn up by himself, and signed also by Samuel May, Sr. and Jr., by Francis Jackson, Wendell Phillips, Theodore Parker, and others. Both the Committee and the Legislature were favorable; an address for removal was voted, and Governor Banks acceded, but with a request, amounting to a condition, that the law of 1855 should be "materially" Lib. 28: 50, modified. The subservient Legislature did accordingly remove the stigma and the prohibition of slave-catching Lib. 28:54. from a large class embraced in the original measure, and otherwise diminished the disunion attitude of the State. Loring removed, the Liberator urged as the next step Lib. 28:51. the procuring of an enactment that no man should be put on trial for his freedom in Massachusetts. At the New England Anti-Slavery Convention in May, Mr. Garrison introduced a resolution recommending petitions to this effect, which were duly put in circulation. While the conVOL. III.-30 465 Lib. 28: 42, 46, 50. 54. Lib. 28:90. 1858. CH. XVIII. stitutionality of the unmutilated Personal Liberty Law could be defended at every point as a simple throwing of the whole burden of slave-catching on the Federal Government- the Constitution being silent as to the agents in Lib. 28:98. Art. 4, § 2, 13. Lib. 28: 170. J. Quincy's Life of J. Q. Adams, p. 113; Lib. 28: 170. this matter -the position which the State was now asked to take was incontestably opposed to "the compact." "That no person who has been held as a slave, shall be delivered up by any officer or court, State or Federal, within this Commonwealth, to any one claiming him on the ground that he owes 'service or labor' to such claimant, by the laws of one of the slave States of this Union" - was clearly at odds with the Constitutional injunction "shall be delivered up." Nevertheless, the abolitionists could appeal on their own behalf to so high an authority as John Quincy Adams. That statesman, objecting to the Constitution of Missouri (pending her admission to the Union) that it disfranchised all the people of color who were citizens of the free States, and was thus "directly repugnant to the rights reserved to every citizen in the Union" under the Federal Constitution, justified a declaratory act by any free-State legislature, making the citizens of Missouri aliens as long as the obnoxious article was maintained. Moreover, he had the courage to say that Congress, by admitting Missouri with such an article, made a breach in the Federal Constitution that would warrant a still more revolutionary proceeding: Therefore, until that portion of the citizens of Massachusetts whose rights were violated by the article in the Missouri Compromise, should be redintegrated in the full enjoyment and possession of those rights, no clause or article of the Constitution of the United States should, within the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, be so understood as to authorize any person whatsoever to claim the property or possession of a human being as a slave; and he would prohibit by law the delivery of any fugitive upon the claim of his master. All which, he said, should be done, not to violate, but to redeem from violation, the Constitution of the United States. It was, indeed, to be expected that such laws would again be met by retaliatory laws of Missouri and the other slaveholding States, and the consequences would be a dissolution de facto of the Union; but that dissolution would be commenced by the article in the Mis- CH. XVIII. souri Constitution. That article,' declared Mr. Adams, 'is itself a dissolution of the Union.'" 1858. Dec. 22; Lib. 28:5. Time had added tenfold strength to this argument, for Congress, at the behest of the Slave Power, had gone on violating the Constitution. It would now shortly seek to impose on Kansas a constitution open to Mr. Adams's special objection, but also far more infamous in that it not merely recognized an existing state of society, but was an instrument in the erection of slavery on virgin soil. Senator Douglas had warned the Administration in December, 1857, that if it persisted in foisting the Lecompton Constitution on the people of Kansas, it would have to maintain it by force of arms. You will then, he said, have nationalized this difficulty; you will have legalized civil war instead of localizing the Kansas quarrel. Nevertheless, on February 2, President Buchanan sent a Lib. 28:23, message to Congress, denouncing the free-State inhabitants of Kansas as rebels, and counselling a settlement of the existing distraction by making the Lecompton Constitution the basis of admission to the Union. He reminded them that the Supreme Court had adjudged that "slavery exists in Kansas by virtue of the Constitution Lib. 28:28. of the United States," and that "Kansas is therefore at this moment as much a slave State as Georgia or South Carolina." 28; Wilson's Rise and Fall of Power, 2: the Slave 544. 28, 48. Lib. 28:27, Wilson's The popular demonstrations against this policy, the resistance promised by the Legislature of Kansas, Douglas's adverse report in the Senate, Crittenden's attempt to secure submission of the Lecompton Constitution to the popular vote were all in vain. The two houses disagreeing, a conference committee adopted the bill contrived by William H. English of Indiana, and on April Lib. 28:75: 30 the enabling act was passed. The first section of Article 7 of the Constitution embedded in the act read as follows: Wilson, 2: 564, 565. "The right of property is before and higher than any consti- Lib. 28: 107. tutional sanction; and the right of the owner of a slave to such |